Mixed Emotions
The Phenomenal Experience of Recognition by
Tobold Leif Rollo
B.A., University of British Columbia, 2006 A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the
Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS
in the Department of Political Science
© Tobold Leif Rollo University of Victoria
All rights reserved. This thesis may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopying or other means, without the permission of the author.
Mixed Emotions: The Phenomenal Experience of Recognition by
Tobold Leif Rollo
B.A., University of British Columbia, 2006
Supervisory Committee
James Tully (Department of Political Science)___ Supervisor
Matt James (Department of Political Science)____ Co-Supervisor or Departmental Member
Arthur Kroker (Department of Political Science)__ Departmental Member
Jeremy Webber (Department of Law)____________ Outside Member
___________________________________________ Additional Member
Supervisory Committee
James Tully (Department of Political Science)___ Supervisor
Matt James (Department of Political Science)____ Co-Supervisor or Departmental Member
Arthur Kroker (Department of Political Science)__ Departmental Member
Jeremy Webber (Department of Law)____________ Outside Member
___________________________________________ Additional Member
ABSTRACT
In this thesis I defend the argument that the conventional account of recognition as a process of linguistic intersubjectivity does not adequately explain the occurrence of non-propositional appraisals of the recognition experience such as shame and trust. I present an alternative account consisting of two distinct but related ‘moments’ comprising the encounter between self and other: the standard linguistic form of intersubjectivity, which I term the ‘narrative moment’, and an affective and behavioural intersubjectivity that I term the ‘phenomenal moment’. Through a concise analysis of contemporary recognition theories, classical phenomenology, and contemporary empirical research on the ‘phenomenological self’ I conclude that the success and failure of recognition depends in some instances on mitigating the tension between the self’s ‘narrative’ and ‘phenomenal’ appraisals of the other, or what I term ‘phenomenal dissonance’.
TITLE PAGE i
ABSTRACT ii
SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS iv
INTRODUCTION 1-7
CHAPTER I
Dual Moments and Dual Selves 8-18
The Hegelian Self 18-22
Axel Honneth’s Perspective-Taking 22-28 Charles Taylor ‘s Dialogical Recognition 28-33 CHAPTER II
Phenomenology and the Problem of Solipsism 34-44
The Science of Alterity 44-55
The Empathic Encounter 55-61
CHAPTER III
Background(s) and Affect 62-70
Recognition Revisited 70-81
CONCLUSIONS
Summary of the Argument 82-85
The Phenomenal Moment 85-90
INTRODUCTION
When a Native person is seen walking along the road, others can see their dignity because it stands out in the way they carry themselves, also the way they face life. Other people want to know what a Native person has they don’t have - we say that others lack a feeling of truth within. If a person doesn’t have this feeling within, they do not feel comfortable. They are looking for something to happen that brings them comfort. -- Twylah Hurd Nitsch (Seneca)1
Theories of recognition must posit a subject, a consciousness, a self, who desires recognition, an affirmation, a confirmation of value from the other. The interaction between self and other is commonly posed as a struggle, a dialogue, the intersubjective source of self-esteem and identity. It is seen as an engagement that promises to transform us and provide us with the confidence to be, or rather become, who we are. Accordingly, in the absence of recognition we are said to suffer serious trauma to our self-esteem, identity, and agency. Theories of recognition therefore turn on questions concerning the recognitive encounter between self and other. How do we see our selves in the moment of recognition? How do we see the other? What are the pre-conditions of this intersubjective meeting? These are the general questions that we will be attending to in the following.
More specifically I would like to explore how we see, experience, and understand our selves and others in different ways at the same time. Why might the subaltern continue to feel misrecognized despite ample public apologies, dialogue, legislation, and reparations? How is it that the emotion of shame exists concurrently with pride? What motivates the hegemon to engage as a partner in dialogue with a ‘lesser’ or even ‘contemptible’ subaltern? I will be arguing that contemporary recognition theories offer
1 Nitsch, Twylah Hurd. “Bridging the Gap with other People,” In the Words of Elders. P.
Kulchynski, D. McCaskill, and D. Newhouse eds. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 88-89.
inadequate explanations to these problems because they conceive the moment of the encounter as housing a single mode of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, a single channel of understanding, a single medium of meaningful exchange: language. Thus, the encounter between self and other is understood as a hermeneutic event, a site of interpretation, a bringing to bear of all the meanings that constitute a person’s history, culture, identity, and nothing more. By this account my self and the other encounter each other carrying our storied lives, which we speak from and through. According to recognition theories, for our meeting to move forward as a genuine recognition process it must be a perpetual meeting of backgrounds, a series of what I will be calling ‘narrative moments’.
I will be arguing that the conceptual scope of this hermeneutic process, the narrative moment, alone cannot convincingly address the difficulties I just identified. For sometimes despite everything we think we know about the other, despite everything we have interpreted, despite all the understandings engendered by our storied accounts, we often discover the surprising persistence of our trust in the other, our shame in ourselves, and of our desire for recognition. Many have attempted to attribute this interference in our narrative understandings to the workings of the subconscious, as in psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity. In our argument, however, we will be focusing primarily on the domain of conscious experience, for the most part because it is the experiential life of human beings that provides recognition with its normative force, but also because I think there are simpler and more productive answers to be found in conscious experience.
I will examine whether that the inexplicable persistence of trust and shame in our storied encounters with the other is best explained with reference to a parallel moment,
one that finds varying degrees of support in virtually every accepted theory of the self, mind, cognition, emotion, and subjectivity. Along side the narrative moment I suggest there is a simultaneous mode of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, a concurrent channel of understanding, a parallel medium of meaningful exchange: pre-theoretical, or phenomenal experience. The ‘phenomenal moment’, as I shall call it, is comprised of our consciously accessible, pre-theoretical and emotional appraisals of the world, thematizations of the others’ expressions and behaviour that, I shall argue, often manifest in tension with or in direct contradiction to our narrative interpretations. In the phenomenological tradition what we are refereeing to has been called an empathic encounter, for this reason I will be referring to it as the phenomenal moment. The tension that emerges between the ‘narrative’ and ‘phenomenal’ moments I will term ‘phenomenal dissonance.’
In these two moments we are in effect two selves, that is, we reflect on others and our selves in two distinct and interrelated ways that are present, if implicitly, in most recognition theories. The ‘narrative self’ stands as our understanding of others and our selves as being a certain type of person that engenders specific roles, rights, and responsibilities. Certain things make sense for me to do or to believe by virtue of me being who I am and I cannot legitimately or even intelligibly be asked to do or believe otherwise. Likewise, I understand and interpret the other through and against my particular tradition, ways, or cultural background. Who you are can only be interpreted and understood from my situatedness in a particular horizon of meaning. Neither you nor I could be otherwise.
The ‘phenomenal self’ is our unmediated pre-theoretical understanding of others and our selves as living, acting, feeling, and accessible subjects. When I see an other’s expressions and behaviours I immediately understand the other as a separate being like myself, a being who is at this moment experiencing shame or pride, is worthy or unworthy of trust, is open or closed to dialogue. But already this is to attribute a great deal more to the self than is considered prudent by theorists sympathetic to the linguistic turn in philosophy, for whom language is constitutive of thought. Accordingly, a large part of what follows will be an exploration of the scope of the phenomenal and its role in the recognition experience.
I would like to provide a brief roadmap of the major moves of the thesis, which is separated into three chapters titled ‘Self and Recognition’, ‘Alterity’, and ‘Intersubjectivity’. In Chapter I we introduce the dual narrative and phenomenal selves in a little more depth after which we identify their inchoate presence in Hegel’s master/slave dialectic. Continuing on to an exploration of recognition theories developed in chiefly Hegelian terms we will explore two distinct and emblematic contemporary recognition theories. The first is articulated by Axel Honneth in his book The Struggle for
Recognition,2 wherein Honneth seeks to naturalize Hegel’s metaphysical conditions for
struggle for recognition by positing a social psychological (Meadian) ‘looking-glass’ self. The second is represented in the dialogical recognition theory of Charles Taylor, who in the tradition of Gadamer portrays the encounter between self and other in terms of pure linguistic or narrative intersubjectivity. Taylor does, however, adapt a thin phenomenal self with spatio-temporal orientational capacities from the work of
2 Honneth, Axel. 1995. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social
Ponty. By the end of Chapter I it will become apparent why the turn to linguistic intersubjectivity was perceived as a necessary advance; how else could we think about mutual understanding other than through some identifiable medium of exchange such as language? In short, language overcame the problem of solipsism.
In Chapter II we will explore the charge of solipsism by way of introduction to Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. Husserl proposed that we could suspend our natural attitudes of the world and rely instead on ‘categorical intuitions’ and presuppositionless understandings to get at the essences of things. As we shall see, phenomenologists like Husserl rejected the claims of Max Scheler and others that the epistemic boundaries between the self and the other were dissolved in an unmediated empathic encounter. Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that we can perceive the other because our own bodies at times present themselves as something unfamiliar to us. Any further knowledge of the other is mediated through language and culture. This position will lead us to a brief discussion of Martin Heidegger, who argued that we do not know the other directly, but through the world of things (eg, tables, cars, houses) which point to a social world populated by others. From Heidegger’s focus on how tradition determines our relations with others by shaping the world of common meanings it is a short step to Gadamer’s focus on language and the shift from phenomenological intersubjectivity to hermeneutics and mutual interpretation.
With a survey of the phenomenological tradition and the problem of solipsism in place we will then turn to an exploration of the scope and depth of the phenomenal self. We will do so with reference to a host of significant empirical evidence which will not only establish a basis of the thin version of the phenomenal self advanced by
Merleau-Ponty and Charles Taylor, but also for a thick version of the phenomenal self containing a fascinating vindication of Scheler’s empathic moment. With an initial thick version of the phenomenal self on the table we will return to our recognition theories to clarify the nature of interference in the narrative encounter.
With the scope of the phenomenal self sufficiently explored, we will begin Chapter III with two minor developments. The first will be to argue that our phenomenal understandings constitute a distinct background running parallel to our culturally derived horizons of meaning, our ‘narrative’ background. The second development will come out of an investigation into the kind of intersubjectivity that the phenomenal background affords. Here the widely accepted model of emotions as ‘appraisals’ will be utilized, with particular attention pad to the phenomenal experience of SHAME. We will seek to distinguish the phenomenal manifestation of SHAME from its narrative counterpart, which will cast some light on the occurrence of phenomenal dissonance, or the unexplained presence of SHAME and other emotions.
We will then return to Honneth and the symbolic interactionist explanation of the struggle for recognition, which I will argue is incomplete and offers little insight into phenomenal dissonance. Furthermore, the rudimentary self-awareness Honneth posits instead of a thin phenomenal self is ill equipped to explain even basic intersubjectivity and shame. We shall see that the theory of the reflective ‘looking-glass’ self harbours a relatively thick phenomenal subject. Next we will return to Charles Taylor and his version of a dual background: a thin phenomenal self that orients us in the physical world and a narrative self that orients us in the social world. It is a problem for Taylor that shame emerges wholly from the narrative moment. We will conclude that the
phenomenal dissonance between narrative and phenomenal in the recognition experience is inexplicable without reference to some irreducible emotional appraisals of the other that fall into tension with our propositional understandings. Propositional understandings of the encounter between self and other cannot adequately account for phenomenal dissonance.
In our conclusion we will briefly discuss work in political theory that has focused on the emotional life of the subaltern and demonstrates the kind of attention to the phenomenal dimensions of experience delineated in this thesis. I will draw from of Sonia Kruks’ Retrieving Experience,3 wherein she uses Simone de Beauvoir’s work on the phenomenal and emotional experience of the subaltern to critique the theories of the subject defended by Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. Finally, I will offer some concluding thoughts on how the claims concerning intersubjectivity defended in this thesis bear on the politics of recognition and the prospects of reconciliation.
3 Kruks, Sonia. 2001. Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist
CHAPTER I: SELF AND RECOGNITION
The future of self research will depend in large measure on how successfully broad theoretical advances are able to link together specific bodies of research that deal with self and identity.1
Dual Moments and Dual Selves
The experience of misrecognition or nonrecognition can be devastating and it behoves theorists to ascertain so far as possible the character of the experience motivating recognition claims. The experiences of recognitive success and failure are often immediate, emotive, and intuitive, and often the significance of the event is only fully disclosed when we reflect and re-present ourselves in the moment. Only in reflection can we appreciate the full gravity of our choices and the implications for our identity.
The distinctly Western preoccupation with self-interpretation has been explored by Charles Taylor in his Sources of the Self.2 Though it is not explicit in Taylor’s work, the experience of the self in the moment of recognition and in memory are central features. As Ian Craib writes in Experiencing Identity: “[A]ny sociological account of our world must imply something about the way people experience the world.”3 The principal material of philosophical inquiry here is the impulse behind the politics of recognition and the moment of encounter. Our methodological access is through the transformative
1 Leary, M. and Tangney, J.P. 2003. “The Self as an Organizational Construct in the
Behavioural and Social Sciences,” Handbook of Self and Identity. Leary, M. and Tangney, J.P. eds. New York: Guildford Press, p. 13.
2 Taylor, Charles 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
and remedial experience wherein I receive affirmation of my ‘self’ through the other and she through me.
So far we have spoken of experiences as conscious events even though our social relations no doubt admit of myriad subconscious psychological motivators. Still none of these will become the explicit basis of recognition claims. The experience of difference and of having an identity are the issues that bring such claims to the fore. Thus, if we are interested in the practice of recognition we must concern ourselves with the conscious manifestations of identity as opposed to its unconscious or subconscious sources. As Sigmund Freud himself commented:
If philosophers find difficulty in accepting the existence of unconscious ideas, the existence of an unconscious consciousness seems to me even more objectionable…And after all, a consciousness of which one knows nothing seems to me a good deal more absurd than something mental that is unconscious.4
Hidden mechanisms will only be useful to our inquiry insofar as they manifest in ways that we can access through reflection. Accordingly, psychoanalytic and neuro-psychological approaches to identity and recognition will be referenced only insofar as they produce social experiences that can be reflexively addressed.
The potency of such experiences notwithstanding, important debates have congealed around the topic of whether it is plausible or even desirable that the politics of recognition gain further traction. The consequences of a continuing shift toward recognition-based institutional arrangements are a matter of contention, but at a deeper level these arguments, which ostensibly wrestle over the coherence of theory and the risks of practice, seem to presume the experiences upon which recognition is predicated.
4 Quoted in Zahavi, Dan. 1999. Self-Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological
Which is not to say that recognition is a finite experience - an isolated event. As Charles Taylor James Tully have persuasively articulated, recognition is part of an ongoing process rather than an end-state. What is important to note is how we verify how the process of recognition is doing its work, not through the satisfaction of governing principles, propositional attitudes, or some procedural finality, but through the continuous reflective appraisals of interlocutors. Unfortunately, the political realm has yet to accommodate this recursive and aspect of identity formation. In a section of his discussion with Nancy Fraser, entitled “On the Phenomenology of Experiences of Social Injustice”, Axel Honneth makes the following argument regarding the importance of experience:
[T]he conceptual framework of recognition is of central importance today, not because it expresses the objectives of a new type of social movement, but because it has proven to be the appropriate tool for categorically unlocking social experiences of injustice as a whole. It is not the particular, let alone new, central idea of oppressed collectives - whether they are characterized in terms of “difference” or “cultural recognition” - that is now to provide the basis for the normative framework of a theory of recognition. Rather, what gives rise to - indeed compels - such a categorical revision are the findings that have been compiled concerning the moral sources of the experience of social discontent [my emphasis].5
I would argue that these ‘moral sources’ are rather narrowly interpreted in contemporary recognition politics and that we can explain the failure of recognition politics in particular cases in the experiences of those involved. Many of these failures are indeed puzzling. For instance, it is now routine for the procedural demands of recognition to be formally satisfied - ie, the subaltern may receive the stipulated reparations, rights, and public apologies - yet there is simultaneously a failure to generate the key experience of recognition for the subaltern, usually because the sacrifices of the
hegemon are experienced as either empty, begrudgingly tendered, self-aggrandizing, or self-serving. Debates about the desired ends of the politics of recognition are thus concerned implicitly or explicitly with its beginnings, with our experiences of the other, or what is termed alterity. We will return to the theme of alterity in the next chapter, but we will attend in this chapter to a matter of principal importance: how we theorize subjectivity and our experience of the self.
To begin, more moderate theories of the subject typically explore multi-dimensional facets of selfhood and are as such well suited to describing the depth of the recognition experience. The theories advanced by Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth attempt to describe the self in a way that appreciates our social, reflective, and experiential relations to ourselves and to others. We shall explore these approaches below, but first I wish to introduce the dimensions of selfhood these authors develop. Within the western tradition there are at least three broad notions of the self that have each come to dominate social theory at particular points in history. We shall introduce all three, but for the purposes of our argument we will reserve our main discussion to two of them.
Traditionally, literature on the self has offered an uneasy partitioning of self-knowledge into meaningful social understandings and meaningless non-social understandings. Recently the designation of certain self-understandings as meaningless has come under scrutiny. Leary and Tangney articulate three crucial domains of selfhood that despite significant experiential support rarely appear as equal partners in social theory. We will explore them in no particular order.
The self is, in fact, somehow involved in (1) people’s experience of themselves (though a self is not needed for consciousness per se), (2) their
perceptions, thoughts, and feelings about themselves, and (3) their deliberate efforts to regulate their own behaviour. However none of these three specific uses of ‘self’ captures the nature of the self in a way that encompasses all of the others. Thus we must either concede that ‘self’ has at least three very different meanings (not a desirable state of affairs if we desire precision and clarity) or else arrive at a definition that encompasses all three of these uses.6
The third (3) we will call the ‘autonomous self’. It describes the experience of the self as a volitional agent and author of actions. The autonomous self is sometimes conceived in the spirit of Cartesian philosophy as a disengaged and rational agent who exercises an objective application of reason to experience, but it may also be thought of in terms of the capacity to reflect upon and make decisions based on experience. Though it is often referred to as the first-person perspective, we might hold that when we adopt a vantage of ourselves as disengaged agents we are actually entertaining a vision of ourselves as third-person objective witness tour own experiences. The reason I propose this shift in usage is that there is another way of understanding ourselves which refers to conscious life but does not involve detachment or disengagement. What we will call the ‘phenomenal self’ (1) is often described as our ‘immediate epistemic self-awareness’, which refers to our pre-reflective, embodied, and orientational first-person perspective. This is the self of immediate and direct perceptual experience, experiences that may or may not become the object of reflection. Both first- and third-person perspectives are discernable in our memories and in the moment, as Dan Zahavi illustrates it in Self-Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation:
I can be prereflectively self-aware of my current perception, and I can reflect and thematize this perception. But I can also reflect upon myself as
6 Leary and Tangney, “The Self as an Organizational Construct in the Behavioural and
the intentional agent and subject of experience, that is, I can reflect upon myself as the one who thinks, deliberates, resolves, acts, and suffers. If I compare that which is given in two different acts of reflection, say, a perception of chirping birds and a recollection of a promenade, I can also focus upon that which has changed, namely the intentional acts, but I can also focus upon that which remains identical, namely, the subject of experience.7
The phenomenal self will receive comprehensive treatment in Chapter II, where we will explore alterity in preparation for our investigation of the phenomenal dimensions of recognition in Chapter III.
Leary and Tangney’s second self (2) we will term the ‘narrative self’ and describes the experience of the self as having an identity, a social and ‘storied’ life. Our particular cultural backgrounds are populated by people who share more or less in our identities and values. Our propensity to entertain a shared or indirect understanding of the self means that in conjunction with the first- and third-person standpoints, we also assume a more or less second-person perspective. This narrative domain of selfhood, commonly referred to as the ‘subject of language’,8 emerged when the account of
intersubjectivity championed by early phenomenologists failed in the eyes of many to bridge the epistemological chasm of solipsism. Just how do we understand the world and others ‘directly’ as the phenomenologists claimed? If we reject metaphysical claims, what then is at the heart of the subject and her relations?
A theory of intersubjectivity grounded in language was subsequently developed and soon came to include diverse approaches ranging from speech-act theory to
7 Zahavi, Dan. 1999. Self-Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation.
Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 138-139.
8 Redman, Peter. 2000. “Introduction,” Identity: A Reader. P. du Gay, J. Evans, and P.
Foucauldian discourse theory. The phenomenal subject was not initially discarded, however. As we shall see in Chapter II, theorists such as Heidegger, Gadamer, and Wittgenstein had from the start posited an explicit connection between the phenomenological subject and linguistic intersubjectivity. Contemporary theorists are much less clear on how subjects are volitional agents and today the threat of hyper-constructivism and the postmodern ‘death of the subject’ have prompted more and more writers to re-introduce a modified autonomous or minimal phenomenal self capable of salvaging human agency. Language provided a bridge between self and other, but not without threatening autonomy.
I have introduced on these three dimensions of selfhood - autonomous, phenomenal, and narrative - because each continues to enjoy broad philosophical, scientific, and experiential support. Historically each has emerged as an alternative to earlier approaches and what was perceived as a failure to capture deep intuitions about self-knowledge. The phenomenal self was developed in the late 19th century when it became clear that the independent consciousness of Kant, Locke and Descartes was irretrievably plagued by the philosophical anathema of solipsism, not to mention an irreconcilable dualism. If the self was primarily disengaged from the world how could it truly know the world or the other? This epistemological problem led many phenomenologists to posit that we make sense of the world and others directly, not through reason or dubious representations.
Each of the three dimensions along with their transitional and recombinant variants are strongly present today. In his historical analysis of Western concepts of selfhood from the 17th century onward, Jerrod Seigel observes that “the basis of selfhood
in Western culture has been sought primarily along or within three dimensions, ones that are familiar and should be easily recognizable by anyone.”9 Seigel identifies a tripartite theorization of bodily, relational, and reflective selves,10 and analogous dimensions have
been found in recent work in cognitive linguistics and neuro-psychology. We will touch on these findings in the next chapter.
This broad support has led many to argue that a multi-dimensional model of the self captures how we experience and consequently understand and identify ourselves. The least problematic account of selfhood takes these various dimensions of the self to be complementary constituents of a holistically or pluralistically conceived subject.11 Similarly, Paul Ricouer has recently traced the semantic history of the term ‘recognition’ through three phases of use: Kantian, Bergsonian, and Hegelian.12 But it is not simply the predominance or simplicity of a tripartite approach that should attract us. In contrast, one-dimensional models of the subject often ascribe the totality of conscious experience to a single facet and make it difficult to explain intersubjectivity let alone the intersubjective basis of recognition.
9 Seigel, Jarrod. 2005. The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in the Western
Europe Since the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, p. 5.
10 Ibid.
11 More psychoanalytic accounts of multi-dimensionality can be found in 2001.
Individual Self, Relational Self, Collective Self. C. Sedikides and M.B. Brewer. eds. Philadelphia, PA: Taylor and Francis (Psychology Press). Also see 1999. The Plural Self: Multiplicity in Everyday Life. J. Rowan and M. Cooper. eds. London: Sage Publications.
12 Ricoeur, Paul. 2005. The Course of Recognition. D. Pellauer trans. Cambridge:
If, for example, the self is conceived as an autonomous agent in the Cartesian sense of cool reasoning over and above one’s own experiences, we have the problem of explaining why we would need or desire recognition. If, on the other hand, the self is conceived as an illusion generated at the intersection of manifold narratives, as Daniel Dennett proposes, it is unclear how she would be capable of experiencing recognition at all.13 We might reasonably ask how it is that either disengaged or illusionary selves can be present in such a way as to experience the process. This critique will re-emerge later in our exploration of Axel Honneth’s recognition theory. But it is not just the reflective self that is incomplete in isolation. As Seigel has observed, to attribute all consciousness to a narrative self is to court “the danger of privileging the form of selfhood too much over the substance.”14 What we invite is a conflation of ‘physical identity’ with ‘social identity’ and, I wish to argue, however they are expressed, recognition claims cannot be motivated or satisfied by the force narrative self-understandings alone.
I suggest that the ontological premises behind one-dimensional subjects are of little use to our discussion since they preclude recognition by placing a chasm between the self and the other. Quite simply, any model that oversimplifies or rejects the subject or our sense of the other (alterity) is incapable of offering a theory of intersubjectivity sufficient to make sense of the dissonance between our multiple appraisals of an intersubjective situation. This is why Seigel argues that “one-dimensional theories are liable to give an inadequate account even of the element of the self they highlight, since
13 See Dennett, Daniel. 1991. Consciousness Explained. New York: Little Brown and
Company, p. 418.
they occlude its debt to the others.”15 More to the point, it is not even clear whether we could call a uni-dimensional self a true self. For just as Charles Taylor has argued that an autonomous subject radically disengaged from any sense of its own orientation in moral space would be unrecognizable, so too would a being that did not experience itself as a volitional agent or as a perceiving consciousness.
As noted above, recognition theorists have developed the connections between identity and the narrative self while ascribing necessary albeit secondary roles to the phenomenal dimension. To understand how this came to be we must investigate the origins of recognition theory and to prepare we must familiarize ourselves with relevant elements of Hegelian philosophy. Although Hegel provides us with one of the earliest and most influential articulations of the intrinsic social reality of human existence, as Honneth observes:
[T]he core conceptual content of what we today call ‘recognition’ has hardly been addressed further; instead, the concept is employed vaguely, usually with passing reference to Hegel, for attitudes and practices by which individuals or social groups are affirmed in certain of their qualities.16
Many of the models of intersubjectivity used to understand the recognition experience are adapted from Hegel’s master/slave dialectic and his philosophy of self-consciousness. The Hegelian dialectic has proven amenable to theories that focus on struggle, identity formation, agency, and human flourishing. To investigate the core conceptual content of recognition we must therefore begin with more that just a passing reference to Hegel. For
15 Ibid.
16 Honneth, Axel. 2006. “Grounding Recognition: A Rejoinder to Critical Questions,”
according to Seigel, “Hegel made selfhood the key to understanding literally everything, while simultaneously providing the most remarkable example of a seemingly three-dimensional account that was one three-dimensional at its core.”17
The Hegelian Self
Philosophers in Hegel’s era were preoccupied in large part with explaining the mystery behind the unity of consciousness: Why is our conscious life an ordered and meaningful experience rather than an incomprehensible muddle of raw sensory input? What is the nature and source of the conceptual framework that organizes reality? Kant famously argued that the unity emerges by virtue of our being in two realms.18 We exist in a noumenal realm of reason and concepts which order the raw experiences we face in the phenomenal realm of physiological impulse and sensory experience. Hegel rejected this, Kant’s transcendental dialectic, arguing that consciousness is not unified in the particular (ie, the individual) but in the absolute (eg, a culture). The absolute is comprised of beings that discover the unity of consciousness by seeing not things but relations, including the relations of the self.19
This is important to our discussion because Hegel is interpreted as holding that only that which has been recognized through consciousness is validated as a part of ‘reality’. The conscious self, too, must be validated through recognition from others for it
17 Seigel, The Idea of the Self, p. 39.
18 Kant, I. 1965. Critique of Pure Reason. trans. N. Kemp Smith. New York: St. Martin’s
Press.
19 Hegel, G.W.F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. A.V. Miller. trans. Oxford: Clarendon
to have a firm sense of its own reality, to possess what Hegel refers to as ‘self-certainty’.20 What emerges from these conditions is the classic Hegelian master/slave dialectic. According to Hegel, the self may seek to force the other into submission and secure a stable source of recognition and the experience of being actualized. Two equal beings enter into a struggle for freedom, each with the desire to wrestle recognition from the other and a confirmation of the self’s independence. Each seeks to procure the honour and prestige that will confer the desired sense of being more than just a creature of base needs. The being that risks its life and chooses freedom over mere existence will rise to become the master, while the being that chooses mere life over freedom resigns himself to slavery. The master receives recognition from the slave who receives none and therefore exists only as a thing for the master.21
In addition to securing recognition, the master no longer has to toil with nature to satisfy his basic needs; the slave is exploited to secure both actualizing recognition and survival. It is at this stage that we encounter Hegel’s extraordinary reversal, for as it turns out the master’s newly realized sense of self-certainty and independence - his reality - turns out to be wholly dependent on the slave, a thing, and therefore tragically hollow. In the meantime the slave has developed a kind of inner discipline as a result of having actively engaged with nature to provide for the master and having lived in perpetual fear of death at the master’s hand. For Hegel, not only does the slave’s fear induce a reflexive self-awareness, the precursor to a genuine sense of self-certainty and importance, the slave’s objectification of nature through labour has produced things that bear the mark of
20 Ibid., pp. 111-112. 21 Ibid., p. 115.
the slave’s creative purpose, things that confer recognition unto their maker.22 Through fear the slave’s consciousness is activated and through work the slave is actualized. In the end the slave does not overthrow the master; he simply surpasses him as a consciousness.23 This is the classic recognition account that has become the prototype upon which so many modern conceptualizations of identity and the desire for recognition have been theorized.
What is important for our purposes is to look at how Hegel’s work has been used to set the terms and the limits of contemporary discussion. Siegel has argued that Hegel offers a somewhat three-dimensional view of being wherein base (phenomenal) sense-certainty and the socio-historical (narrative) self are constituted by the reflective absolute (autonomous) consciousness manifest through human beings. To concentrate our argument we will be focussing on how the narrative and phenomenal dimensions have been picked up and thematized today. Those who have traditionally drawn upon and interpreted Hegel tend not to preserve the relationship between these two aspects of the self. Early on, the left Hegelians’ focus on the individual undermined intersubjectivity and fell victim to the charge of solipsism, while right Hegelians tended to advance a dogmatic metaphysics. Thinkers such as R.R. Williams24 and Philip Kain25 have
22 Ibid., pp. 117-118. 23 Ibid.
24 Williams, R.R. 2003. “The Concept of Recognition in Hegel’s Phenomenology of
Spirit,” Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: New Critical Essays. A. Denker and M. Vater eds. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books.
25 Kain, Philip. 2005. Hegel and the Other: A Study of the Phenomenology of Spirit. New
developed a third, socio-intersubjective interpretation of Hegel, similar variants of which serve as the basis of contemporary recognition theories.
Though both Kant and Hegel claim to predicate their inquiries on experience, Hegel’s phenomenological project is rather different from the work of those now identified as phenomenologists and their conceptions of the phenomenal self. Indeed, Hegel’s portrayal of recognition as an essential human experience within cultures is far more amenable to narrative accounts of self, subject, and identity, especially when integrated with the linguistic expressivism of Herder. Today, language is understood as the fabric of intersubjectivity and recognition, with the master/slave dialectic providing an account of the desire behind the struggle for recognition: parts seeking an understanding of themselves within the whole.
The modern relationship presumed between alterity and recognition is conditioned by Hegel’s idealism. Prior to recognition, the subaltern other is experienced (by hegemon and subaltern both) as a base dependent object, a thing, and after recognition he is transformed into an affirmed independent subject, a human being. In our contemporary use of the paradigm the shame that stems from the perception of oneself as mere thing in the eyes of the other and in one’s own eyes, as illustrated in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre,26 Edward Said,27 and Franz Fanon,28, becomes the impetus for
recognition claims. In Chapter III we shall see how too literal an interpretation of the
26 See Sartre, J.P. 1946. Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology.
H. Barnes trans. New York: Washington Square Press.
27 See Said, Edward. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books.
28 See Fanon, Franz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. C.L. Markmann trans. New York:
language of subject and object leads recognition theorists to discount the phenomenal dimension of the self. But for now, with Hegel’s paradigm in place, we will turn to the recognition theories of Axel Honneth and Charles Taylor. As Judith Butler has noted, “any theory of recognition would have to give an account of the desire for recognition, and recognize that desire sets the limits and the conditions for the operation of recognition itself. ”29 Here our goal will be to identify how the dual narrative and phenomenal self has been figured to explain the desire for recognition.
Axel Honneth’s Perspective-Taking
To set up the discussion, Axel Honneth’s description of the basis of recognition claims is worth quoting at length:
Up to the present day, when individuals who see themselves as victims of moral maltreatment describe themselves, they assign a dominant role to categories that, as with "insult" or "degradation," are related to forms of disrespect, to the denial of recognition. Negative concepts of this kind are used to characterize a form of behavior that does not represent an injustice solely because it constrains the subjects in their freedom for action or does them harm. Rather, such behavior is injurious because it impairs these persons in their positive understanding of self -an understanding acquired by intersubjective means. There can be no meaningful use whatsoever of the concepts of "disrespect" or "insult" were it not for the implicit reference to a subject's claim to be granted recognition by others.30
To get at the motivating source of the relation, Honneth offers an interpretation of Hegel which focuses on the early Jena writings on the social and communicative preconditions of ethical life rather than the later master/slave dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit.
29 Butler, Judith. 2001. “Giving and Account of Oneself,” diacritics 31, 4, p. 30.
30 Honneth, Axel. “Integrity and Disrespect: Principles of a Conception of Morality
According to Honneth, the later dialectical recognition model provides necessary explications of the experience of recognition but within a metaphysical framework of stages in the development of Spirit which stands in contradiction to Hegel’s earlier more ‘sociological’ work.
Honneth advances a pattern of recognition derived from early-Hegelian ‘practical relations to the self’: self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem. Each of these can be viewed in contemporary terms as a target of disrespect that can inflict immense psychological damage. The first, self-confidence, is tied to the security one forms as an infant with respect to the love and concern of others.31 This feature holds across cultures because of the universality of the parent-child relationship. Severe trauma such as rape or torture can destroy this basic confidence. Next, self-respect refers to our status as morally responsible self-legislating persons possessing characteristically universal Kantian dignity and rights.32 It is from this vantage that we engage in public (Habermasian)
discourse. Finally, self-esteem refers to our social standing as valuable, unique, and particular, and is qualified through a culture’s contribution to the common good.33 This contribution is essential in the modern context because to give praise to a non-contributing group would simply parallel the unqualified recognition of classic honour systems. The concepts of self-respect and self-esteem which were conflated in traditional honour societies are today acknowledged as distinct arenas: rights-based recognition and identity-based recognition.
31 Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, pp. 95-107. 32 Ibid., pp. 107-121.
As opposed to single form of recognition advanced in the master/slave dialectic, here all three phases of recognition must be met to guarantee the full development of persons in society and as such they constitute the ‘formal conception of ethical life’. For Honneth, the necessarily reciprocal nature of these phases of recognition represents the internal logic of social life and a genuinely ethical society is one that secures conditions which allow everyone the opportunity to attain these practical relations to the self. The problem that remains - the problem Hegel dissolved by situating the unity of consciousness in the absolute rather than the particular - is why human beings necessarily desire and struggle to attain recognition from the consciousness of the other. If not a dialectical movement toward the whole, what is it about the self that drives us?
Honneth poses the question as to what compelled groups to make the shift from traditional to post-tradition conceptions of recognition. In other words, what features of selfhood prompted subjects to look inward and demand recognition based on social identities as distinct from social positions? The growth and maturation of intersubjective identities is predicated, according to Hegel, on the individual’s ability to intuit themselves, their consciousness, in the other. But according to Honneth Hegel nowhere completes this line of thought and the problem goes unresolved.34 How and why do we seek recognition? For possible answers Honneth turned to social psychological models of selfhood, in particular to the work of Herbert George Mead.35
Mead himself began with the pragmatist principle that subjects become aware of themselves only when the physical world imposes resistance to their plans and forces a
34 Ibid., p. 24.
35 Mead, G.H. 1934. Mind, Self, and Society form the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist.
reflexive perspective of self assessment. The self comes into view when it runs into something. Mead observed, however, that it is not the self which becomes the focus in most cases. Obstacles generally prompt greater scrutiny of the world rather than the self. Except for a category of distinctly ‘social’ obstacles. In navigating our social relationships with others we are often faced with resistance from others, thus forcing us to turn inward to reflect on ourselves as the source of desires and intentions. Honneth held that the self that falls under scrutiny in this moment is the ‘me’: the consciousness of social expectations and norms observed from a second-person perspective as we attempt to see ourselves as others see us. This position of reflection allows us to take a normatively sensitive attitude toward the world and ourselves.
The self that performs this scrutinizing is identified as the ‘I’, a decentred observer not itself reflectively accessible, which stands as the spontaneous creative source of resistance to forms of recognition. This other-stimulated interaction between the neutral ‘I’ and the social ‘me’ forms the self-conscious subject and the process is intended to explain in naturalized terms the Hegelian development of self-consciousness and the perpetual desire for recognition. The unpredictable ‘I’ disrupts the recognition patterns that are otherwise maintained through our social perspective-taking. It is the reflexive ‘me’ consciousness that gives us the experience of agency. As Kath Woodward explains in Understanding Identity:
Mead presents an empirical self, but one which is reflective, and conscious of the positioning of that self within the broad framework of social relations through the operation of the imagination…Through the operation of conscious reflexivity, this is a self which is capable of exercising some agency in the process of identity formation.36
36 Woodward, K. 2003. Understanding Identity. New York: Oxford University Press, p.
We might have discussed these further, but Honneth has since abandoned Mead’s social psychology as a method of naturalizing the Hegelian model because it is doubtful whether dialogical recognition as a process and a concept can be properly understood in terms of the second-person perspective-taking. In a reply to critics, Honneth concedes:
I have come to doubt whether [Mead’s] views can actually be understood as contributions to a theory of recognition: in essence, what Mead calls ‘recognition’ reduces to the act of reciprocal perspective-taking, without the character of the other’s action being of any crucial significance; the psychological mechanism by which shared meanings and norms emerge seems to Mead generally to develop independently of the reactive behaviour of the two participants, so that it also becomes impossible to distinguish actions according to their respective normative character.37
In other words, it is unclear what Mead’s approach tells us about recognition if all perspective-taking amounts to is a monological thought experiment featuring an imaginative construct of the other, as opposed to a dialogical practice between self and other. Likewise, Honneth has abandoned the notion of the spontaneously creative ‘I’ as prompting the shift from traditional to post-traditional modes of recognition. In an interesting psychodynamic turn he now attributes this to the subconscious need to control one’s environment; a profound drive to dominate that emerges in infancy.
The ‘I’ – which, for Mead, was the prereflective locus of all spontaneous impulses – can no longer be seen as the ‘origin’ of the rebellion against established patterns of recognition…I now assume that the impulse to rebel against established forms of recognition can be traced to a deep-seated need to deny the independence of those with whom one interacts and to have them, ‘omnipotently’, at one’s disposal.38
37 Honneth, “Grounding Recognition,” p. 502. 38 Ibid., p. 503-4.
Wishing to preserve the dialectical struggle Honneth contends that “the permanence of the ‘struggle’ for recognition stems not from an unsocializable ego’s drive for realization but rather from the anti-social striving for independence that leads each subject to deny, again and again, the other’s difference.”39 In short, we have in essence gone from the sociological ‘I’ to the psychoanalytic ‘Id’.40
There are difficulties that arise for recognition theory if we take Honneth’s move seriously. We might reasonably ask what real gains he has made in shifting from the logic of recognition as an internal monological perspective-taking to an interior subconscious ego-centrism. For if a Meadian approach made us suspicious of the ethics of an I/me relation, Honneth’s revisions leave us questioning the ethics of recognition altogether. It is difficult to resolve, for instance, how the ethical force of recognition, not to mention the need for self-confidence, respect, and esteem, could plausibly follow from a desire to dominate the other and deny their difference. We seem to gain an explanation of the force behind the struggle for recognition at the expense of its ends.
We are also left without a definite concept of the self. In a way it is fortunate that Honneth rejects both the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ of the sociological account, since preserving just one or the other would limit us to the untenably monolithic subject we met earlier. As Ian Raib observes: “If I were only an ‘I’ then I would be involved in no social relationships whatsoever; if I were only a ‘me’ then I would be an inanimate object
39 Ibid., p. 504.
40 Honneth qualifies his reliance on the psychoanalytic to explain the dynamic in full:
“Regarding the question of whether there could be a unified source of all impulsive rebellion against established forms of recognition, we find ourselves in the domain of wild speculation.” Ibid.
defined by others.”41 Still, we might derive a familiar set of experiences from the Hegelian phases of recognition in Honneth’s work. To start, the self clearly has an embodied and phenomenal dimension, given the pre-linguistic origins of self-confidence. The self also admits of a strong narrative dimension, as evidenced by the public origins of self-respect and self-esteem. It has been my aim here to illustrate Honneth’s Hegelian inspired variant of a dual self, a self who desires recognition. When we return to Honneth’s work in Chapter III to discuss Meadian intersubjectivity we will explore whether the account privileges one particular dimension of selfhood at the expense of the overall approach. For now we shall turn to our second recognition theorist, Charles Taylor.
Charles Taylor’ Dialogical Recognition
Like Honneth, Taylor has highlighted the harm and injury entailed in the experience of misrecognition and nonrecognition:
[O]ur identity is party shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being.42
Both Honneth and Taylor underscore the role of the narrative self in forming social identities, but where Honneth adapted a social psychological (and now psychoanalytic) approach to Hegel, Taylor has drawn on various phenomenological sources including
41 Craib, Experiencing Identity, p. 5.
42 Taylor, Charles. 1994. “The Politics of Recognition,” Multiculturalism: Examining the
Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein to provide a more thorough account of selfhood and intersubjectivity. More so than Honneth, I would argue, this diversity of sources permits Taylor to appreciate the complexity of selfhood.
Taylor begins his Sources of the Self by presenting a case for the communitarian formulation of the social world. He writes that notions of dignity, respect, and well-being may take distinct forms in different cultures, yet they speak to a universal aspect of moral life for all human beings. Qualitative social distinctions come out of a seemingly innate desire to connect with the good and as such these ‘strong evaluations’ are grounded in a moral point of view that allows us to makes sense of ourselves as agents. The set of strong evaluations one holds takes place against a particular historical and cultural background or framework, within which one must orient themselves and consider the questions: ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What kind of person should I be?’ One’s answers to these questions delineate an identity which, although understood in terms of individual authenticity is nevertheless constituted in conversation with other members of my culture through ‘webs of interlocution’. Taylor states it succinctly: “Strong evaluation is essential to identity, and identity is essential to being a fully functioning human being.”43 Taylor’s communitarian approach attributes a narrative structure to the ‘I’ in the question “Who am I?” Here we are far from the autonomous44 or phenomenal45 sense of
the self, for we exist as selves only with reference to others. But this does not mean that Taylor has ignored the diversity of self-understanding. He of course rejects the notion of
43 Taylor, Charles. “Reply to Commentators,” Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research, 54, 1 (March 1994), p. 209.
44 Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 26. 45 Ibid., pp. 32-33.
a self that stands over and above culture and experience, a Kantian agent of reason situated outside the particular and constituted monologically. It is true that the categories of dignity, respect, and well-being which Taylor cites as universal have the ring of Kantian universals, but this is because they are particularly Western conceptualizations. Where Kant wants to say human dignity and so on are necessary moral principles, Taylor wants to identify them as expressions of a life inevitably lived with others.
The intersubjective formation of identity is still very much the domain of the narrative self, but Taylor also attributes a significant role to the phenomenal dimensions of self-experience. From the work of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, Taylor observes that just as meanings in language emerge within a culture and its practices, our basic experiences take place against a background of a field of perception. Taylor therefore refers to ‘agent’s knowledge’: our non-theoretical, pre-representational, and proto-linguistic understandings.46 There is a grounding link here between the phenomenal and
the narrative with respect to everyday life. From the work of Merleau-Ponty, Taylor brings forth the observation that our access to the world is enabled and constrained by our embodied perception. We necessarily see the world from a particular standpoint by virtue of our body’s spatial and sensory point of view.
But the phenomenal self is not just an orientational situatedness. For Taylor, as with Heidegger, “[l]iving with things involves a certain kind of understanding, which we might also call ‘preunderstanding.’ That is, things first figure for us in their meaning of
46 Taylor, Charles. 1995. “Overcoming Epistemology,” Philosophical Arguments.
relevance for purposes, desires, activities.”47 This understanding allows us to physically negotiate our world without thinking about it. In phenomenological terms we are adept at ‘coping’ with the world in a conscious but not yet reflective way. Taylor argues that this coping enables and constrains how we negotiate the physical world.
[T]he mass of coping is an essential support to the episodes of conceptual focus in our lives, not just in the infra-structural sense that something has to be carrying our mind around from library to laboratory and back. More fundamentally, the background understanding we need to make the sense we do of the pieces of thinking we engage in resides in our ordinary coping.48
We are always dealing with a holistic perception of the world, a ‘background understanding’ that is sustained and evolved in what Taylor calls “the embedding of reflective knowledge in ordinary coping.”49 In this way our experience of the world provides a pre-theoretical check against our possible misunderstandings. This argument places Taylor in the realm of realism, but a relatively uncontroversial one. In appreciating our everyday physical coping “one awakes to unproblematic realism rather than a daring philosophical ‘thesis’.”50
Though it goes undeveloped, in addition to the linguistically based field of intersubjectivity that Honneth describes, Taylor also seems to hint at an adjunct category of phenomenal intersubjectivity. He states, for instance, that the “ability to be charming or seductive exists not in my body and voice, but in
47 Taylor, Charles. “Merleau-Ponty and the Epistemological Picture,” Cambridge
Companion to Merleau-Ponty. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, p. 34.
48 Ibid., pp. 35-36. 49 Ibid., p. 37. 50 Ibid., p. 39.
interlocutor.”51 It is not simply the words we speak that make an impression, therefore, it is our presence as speaker. The relation of self to other is not exhausted by the pure linguistic exchange, there is also a thin phenomenal moment. It should be settled, however, that this potential phenomenal moment is not distinct from and merely a variant of the narrative moment. For although the communication is not exclusively linguistic, the meanings conveyed emerge along with language in culturally distinct practices. Thus intonation and body language are conditioned by rather than conditions of communication. We will address this issue more in Chapter III, but in this short introduction I hope to have shown how Hegel along with his philosophical progeny Honneth and Taylor identify the desire, medium, and goals of recognition in the inherent structure of sociality: for Honneth in the Struggle for Recognition it is primarily a function of the perspective-taking ‘me’, and for Taylor it is inspired by an innate disposition toward the good and necessarily against a cultural background.
With the Meadian spontaneous and creative ‘I’ in serious doubt it seems we are invited to ascribe disruptions in recognition patterns to the narrative moment as described by Taylor. Is this moment enough? I would like to explore the possibility that the narrative moment alone is insufficient to explain certain types of emotional interference in our storied accounts. The main question I wish to address is why does the subaltern continue to have fresh experiences of shame and distrust despite dialogue and despite receiving the very public apologies, rights, and reparations she believed would be enough?
In the next chapter we will explore the scope of the phenomenal moment in the intersubjective exchange. We will do this by way of introduction to the major moves made in phenomenology, past and present, in dealing with the self’s relation to others. This will prepare us for our return to recognition theory in the third and final chapter. In Chapter III, then, we will establish whether and to what extent we have been privileging the narrative self in the recognition of identity. In short, we shall discern whether we have moved toward a conflation of self with ‘social identity’ in the politics of recognition.
CHAPTER II: ALTERITY
To the extent that I am not just a mind, and not just a lived body, and to the extent that my existence depends on a biological constitution, knowledge about the brain can enrich my knowledge of myself and of the capacities that make me what I am. The idea is not to replace one discourse with another, but to supplement one with the other.1
Phenomenology and the Problem of Solipsism
We were introduced in the previous chapter to the recognition theories of Honneth and Taylor, and I made the argument that while they had after Hegel articulated a dual self at the centre of the recognition experience they did not clearly delineate the significance or function of the phenomenal self. This is a problem when we see that too strong a focus on the narrative approach leaves us unable to account for certain patterns in the experience of recognition, namely, interference in the narrative moment. In order to explain the full range of experiences of misrecognition and nonrecognition, then, we require an understanding of the narrative moment, where social understandings are engaged, and its relation to the phenomenal moment, where our perceptual understandings occur.
Before we can explore this relationship in depth we need to show how the phenomenal self is thought to provide intersubjective understandings. It has not traditionally been thought up to this task. According to Dan Zahavi, “phenomenologists have often endeavoured to unearth pre- or extralinguistic form of intersubjectivity, be it
1 Gallagher, Shaun. “Self Narrative, Embodied Action, and Social Context,” Between
Suspicion and Sympathy: Paul Ricoeur’s Unstable Equilibrium. A. Wiercinski ed. Toronto: The Hermeneutic Press, p. 409.
in simple perception or in tool-use, in emotions, drives, or body-awareness.”2 But as we have seen with Taylor, the phenomenal self seems too rudimentary, to thin to add much to the depth of intersubjectivity necessary for genuine recognition. The shift to linguistic intersubjectivity and its focus on language provides a medium and a relation to the other which explains the formation of identities and clearly sets the pre-conditions of intercultural recognition. Zahavi summarizes the basic case made against phenomenology thus:
To speak a foreign subject, of an other, is to speak of something that, for essential reasons, will always transcend its giveness for me. Qua foreign subject, it will be in possession of a self-giveness that, in principle, is inaccessible to me. For this reason phenomenology will be unable to account for its and must, therefore, remain solipsistic, in its foundation as well as its results. This criticism has been related to one of the most decisive paradigm shifts in twentieth-century philosophy: the turn from the philosophy of subjectivity to the philosophy of language.3
The theories generated subsequent to the ‘linguistic turn’ have proven central to our understanding of membership in storied communities such as families, classes, and nations. As Paul Ricoeur has demonstrated, our experiences through life are woven together in narrative time to form a coherent life story.4 Narrative is what organizes and thematizes experience to make sense of our lives. And yet we are not the sole authors of these stories, as Alasdair Macintyre5 and Charles Taylor have shown; our narratives are
2 Zahavi, Dan. 2005. Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person
Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 176.
3 Ibid., p. 147.
4 Ricoeur, Paul. 1984. Oneself as Another. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press; and
Ricoeur, Paul. 1984. Time and Narrative. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
